Running IBM Dynamic System Analysis (DSA) remotely on VMware ESXi

In order to collect and analyse system information from an IBM system with VMware ESXi installed to help diagnose system problems, this can be performed by running the IBM Dynamic System Analysis remotely to collect the system information with a system running VMware ESXi.

Firstly, you will need to download the portable executable for the client connecting to the remote host. The various client operating system downloads are available from http://www-947.ibm.com/support/entry/portal/docdisplay?lndocid=serv-dsa.

Once the portable executable has been downloaded, you will need to enable remote connections to the VMware ESXi shell. This can be performed from the host configuration using the vSphere client, by performing the following:

1) Browse to Home > Inventory > Hosts and Clusters.

2) Select Host and the Configuration tab.

3) Select Software, Security Profile and Properties.

4) Start both the ESXi Shell and SSH services.

In the environment to which I was invoking the executable for a Windows client operating system to collect the system information by running the below command, where the filename of the executable was ibm_utl_dsa_310p_windows_i386.exe, where the username and password are the credentials to connect to the host and the host details of the ESXi host either by hostname or IP address.